Supporting the stable operation of machinery, maintenance of quality and improvement in production efficiency through the sophistication of predictive diagnostics

Hitachi Power Solutions Co., Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd.(TSE: 6501), announced that it is adding new "Failure cause estimation" and "Predictive services" to its operated services using the original predictive diagnostics system. The new failure cause estimation service provides information useful for identifying the location of faults by checking past fault history and relevant sensor data against machinery prediction data, while the new failure predictive service estimates the length of time machinery can continue to operate from trends in predictive diagnostics data. Hitachi Power Solutions plans to start providing the new services from April 2017.

In recent years, attempts to monitor the status of equipment based on data collected from sensors fitted to the equipment to prevent unexpected downtime due to machinery failure, thus improving the utilization of equipment and reducing maintenance costs, have become more widespread. In particular, machinery maintenance needs have changed from regular maintenance as the mainstream approach to prevention of failure through the detection of changes in machinery status in advance, and sophisticated maintenance technologies using predictive diagnostics results and information about machinery maintenance operations are required.

Hitachi Power Solutions has developed systems that combine Hitachi's knowhow of maintenance services for various industrial machinery with data mining technology accumulated in the IT sector, such as the predictive diagnostics system that helps prevent unexpected downtime and the system that enables predictive diagnosis in the edge computing environment as an industry pioneer. Using these systems, Hitachi Power Solutions has provided services for predicting machinery failure.

To meet changing machinery maintenance needs, Hitachi Power Solutions has now added new "Failure cause estimation" and "Predictive services", effectively using the data gathered from machinery and its knowledge of maintenance operations. By providing these to customers as new functions of the predictive diagnostics service, Hitachi Power Solutions will make it possible to deal with machinery malfunction more efficiently and draw up plans for dealing with unexpected downtime. These services will be used accumulate data and perform diagnostics on an ongoing basis, leading to the identification of new issues and the provision of services to resolve these new issues in a process of collaborative creation with customers.

Hitachi Power Solutions possesses considerable know-how relating to machinery and its care and maintenance, having since its foundation operated service businesses for industry, IT, and other forms of social infrastructure, especially electric power and energy. This includes the predictive diagnostics system, launched in June 2013, which monitors machinery to prevent unanticipated downtime with ICT and Data mining technology. The predictive diagnostics system is one of applications of Hitachi's Lumada IoT platform. In June, 2016, Hitachi Power Solutions developed the predictive diagnosis system for the edge computing environment by porting predictive diagnosis engine (including the learning function) to IoT (Internet of Things) gateway of Eurotech Corporation which was a partner of Hitachi Insight Group.